Discovery BoxAmos 7:17 
Context7:17 “Therefore this is what the Lord says:
‘Your wife will become a prostitute in the streets 1
and your sons and daughters will die violently. 2
Your land will be given to others 3
and you will die in a foreign 4 land.
Israel will certainly be carried into exile 5 away from its land.’”
Amos 9:1
Context9:1 I saw the sovereign One 6 standing by the altar 7 and he said, “Strike the tops of the support pillars, 8 so the thresholds shake!
Knock them down on the heads of all the people, 9
and I will kill the survivors 10 with the sword.
No one will be able to run away; 11
no one will be able to escape. 12
1 tn Heb “in the city,” that is, “in public.”
2 tn Heb “will fall by the sword.”
3 tn Heb “will be divided up with a [surveyor’s] measuring line.”
4 tn Heb “[an] unclean”; or “[an] impure.” This fate would be especially humiliating for a priest, who was to distinguish between the ritually clean and unclean (see Lev 10:10).
5 tn See the note on the word “exile” in 5:5.
6 tn Or “the Lord.” The Hebrew term translated “sovereign One” here is אֲדֹנָי (’adonay).
7 sn The altar is perhaps the altar at Bethel.
8 tn Or “the capitals.” The Hebrew singular form is collective.
9 tn Heb “cut them off on the head of all of them.” The translation assumes the objective suffix on the verb refers to the tops of the pillars and that the following prepositional phrase refers to the people standing beneath. Another option is to take this phrase as referring to the pillars, in which case one could translate, “Knock all the tops of the pillars off.”
10 tn Heb “the remnant of them.” One could possibly translate, “every last one of them” (cf. NEB “to the last man”). This probably refers to those who survive the collapse of the temple, which may symbolize the northern kingdom.
11 tn Heb “a fugitive belonging to them will not run away.”
12 tn Heb “a survivor belonging to them will not escape.”
